It is generally known to provide support for individuals sitting in a chair. It has been determined that certain shapes for chair backs provide increased support for individuals, thereby minimizing stress on the bodies of individuals, such as back stress, and providing a more comfortable sitting experience.
Comfort features that require little or no adjustment, particularly those directed to the back region, are in increasing demand in seating design. Prior designs have attempted to incorporate adjustment features in an effort to minimize stress on a user. For example, adjustments such as tilting backrests and slidable chair seats have been employed. Such mechanisms often require complex controls, linkages and other parts. Many chairs, such as collaborative seating, conference room seating, seating in team spaces and lobby seating, are utilized for relatively short periods of time or used by multiple people. Users typically will not take the time to make multiple adjustments on chairs used for a short period of time. When a user leaves the chair, it will generally be occupied by a new user. People come in various heights and sizes and any user adjustments to optimize comfort made by a first user are unlikely to be optimized for the next user. As a result task chairs with multiple adjustments tend not to be used in collaborative and short-term sitting applications. An alternative is a chair that is often used in short-term and collaborative environments with few or no adjustments. These chairs are sub-optimized for most users. It is desirable to provide a chair that self-adjusts to accommodate a variety of people or with minimal adjustment. Moreover, regular changes in body posture resulting from sitting for protracted periods pose unique problems in designing an ergonomic system not fully addressed by these designs. As such, many past chair solutions provide only monolithic solutions to wide ranging ergonomic needs. Thus, past designs have failed to provide adequate comfort to varying individuals that sit with disparate postures. It is, therefore, desirable to provide a chair back that conforms to the body, and in particular, on the lumbar and thoracic regions of the back of a variety of users sitting in disparate positions.
In lobbies and other public spaces it is desirable to keep a particular look or orientation to the furniture. Prior designs provide seating units with fixed orientation which a user is unlikely to move and which does not facilitate alternative postures or full utilization of the furniture. For example, two chairs set next to each other in a lobby orient their users parallel to each other. The users must rotate their bodies in order to look each other in the eye as they converse. It is desirable to have seats and/or backs which swivel to allow the user to orient himself relative to his or her task or other people. It is also desirable to have a chair which allows for alternative postures.
The present invention is provided to solve the problems discussed above and other problems, and to provide advantages and aspects not previously provided. A full discussion of the features and advantages of the present invention is deferred to the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.